The Smear Bund [1]never rests — not even on Christmas. Especially not on Christmas. And they’ve been really active lately, what with Ron Paul gaining in the polls and in the hearts and minds of a growing number of young people: we can’t have that! I’ve waded through the muck and mire, so you don’t have to — go here [2]to read a full accounting.

One would think that the sheer counterintuitiveness of the proposition that the country’s leading libertarian politician is a Nazi sympathizer would deter the Smear Brigade from trying to pull that one off — but no. From the left-leaning cyber-lair of “Orcinus,” where the professional “extremist”-hunter David Neiwert [3](a kind of low-budget John Roy Carlson[4]) holds court, to the supposedly opposite end of the spectrum over at “Stormfront,” where the “Commander[5]” of the American National Socialist Workers Party pontificates, the hue and cry is going up: Paul is a Nazi!

This morning the New York Times took up this theme, with a vicious taunt [6]coming out of the mouth of Virginia Heffernan, who repeats the laughable accusations of an admitted Nazi as indisputable fact. Paul “seems to have Nazi troubles, as in theyâ€™re saying heâ€™s one of them,” she gloats — and hails a “vid-lash” against Ron Paul. Yeah, the Paul supporters have so far dominated Youtube and the internet in general, where their movement was born, but we’ll show them: Heffernan posts a video by one Mike Fluggenock, a shrill leftist propganda short that focuses not on Paul’s positions but on two or three individuals in a crowd of some 5,000 at a rally in Philadelphia.

What’s interesting about Senor Fluggenock, however, isn’t his skills as a film-maker, or even as a propagandist[7], but the fact that he was one of six [8]American “artists” to make contributions to Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust cartoon contest. Here it is[9].

Gee, I don’t wonder that Fluggenock’s entry didn’t place[10]. That is kind of heavy-handed, even for the Iranians. After all, is the evil of the Holocaust really equivalent to the admittedly brutal Israeli occupation? I haven’t noticed the Israelis killing 6 million Palestinians in extermination chambers, but I’m sure this is just an oversight on my part. What I couldn’t help noticing, however, is that Fluggenock travels in some of the same circles [11]as Bill White, the neo-Nazi “Commander” and source of the charge that Paul is a secret “white nationalist. DC Indymedia, where Fluggenock is part of of the “editorial collective, seems to have it’s own Nazi problem[12]. DC Indymedia has also been promoting[13] White’s story. Hmmmmm …..

Ms. Hefferan, described herein[14] as “a newly ubiqitous [sic] cultural critic,” apparently determined to follow in the footsteps of Judith Miller[15], isn’t too picky about her sources. Judy had Chalabi[16]: Virginia has Bill White, the supreme “Commander” of the American National Socialist Workers Party, and Senor Fluggenock, a cartoonist with a cartoonish view of world politics.

In her MediaBistro interview[14], the fresh-faced golden-haired Ms. Heffernan burbles on about her faaaaabulous career, from fact-checker [!] at Tina Brown’s New Yorker to her ascendance as A Newly Ubiquitous Cultural Critic:

“I was disillusionedâ€”not radically disillusioned, just a little disillusionedâ€”with graduate school, and had decided to spend the summer in New York working at a bookstoreâ€”Chapter & Verse on St. Marks, which isn’t there anymore. My now-friend Rob Boynton came in while I was reading Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer, and struck up a conversation. I learned he was a journalist, and it was through him that I got the idea that it could be a profession.”

She was disillusioned — and now I am. How in the name of all that’s holy could such an air-head possibly become A Newly Ubiquitous Cultural Critic? Yes, but air-heads have their uses, and the Smear Bund couldn’t function without them: smearing doesn’t take much talent. And it pays.